“I’ve been lucky to have great mentors and to be part of great teams and to not have had to face the kinds of harassment and the things that you read about. The kinds of things we’re seeing exposed every day right now. Especially in the sciences—everywhere really. I’ve been lucky in my career, but there’s the, ‘Oh you got that because you’re a woman and they needed more women.’ OK, buddy. Or ‘Your fellowship for women in science is discriminating against men.’ OK.

Other than those kinds of conversations, I’ve been really lucky and I continue to be lucky. To be part of the company I’m a part of [that] I know values diversity and is making really active changes and actively pushing back against the status quo. That’s really important.”

“Being in love is discovering a part of yourself through someone else. According to my husband, we have this agreement where we’re the only people we’ve ever loved, we have no past. [Laughter] And that kind of works for us. But the truth is any time you feel like, or I have—I won’t speak for everybody—I have felt like I was in love—and there’s all kinds of love too, right? There’s the friendship, there’s family. And let’s be real, even [with] family, there are people that you love and connect with more than others, right. But that always resonated or burned something within me because I was discovering something about myself in that person. I also think that when people break up it’s really that tragic. It’s because you’re breaking up with a part of yourself that you identified in someone. Whether it’s something you aspired to or even sometimes you’re attracted to the self-justification, the negativity. Relationships [can be] toxic. You don’t always fall in love with the people you’re supposed to fall in love with. But I think it’s because somebody mirrors something to you. Whether it’s the promise of it or the actuality of it, you see something reflect back.”

"Being able to be vulnerable with my partner and open myself up, which is difficult for me, to be honest. It's really difficult to discuss certain things, to open myself up to criticism, to change in partnership with someone. That's a big part of love for us. Something, like I said, I struggle with, I'm not good at, but I need to commit to being better at it. It's something I'm not good at necessarily, but because I love my my wife, I'm willing to become better at it."

“There’s that phrase, ‘If you love something, set it free.’ I think that’s a principle that’s really difficult for everyone. Myself included. But it is something that I come back to sometimes. If you love something, you’re not trying to possess it or control it. That being said, I do think a lot of people are afraid of love and afraid of being vulnerable. Personally I think of being 'in love' as being willing to be radically open and radically vulnerable. I don’t really know another way to be. I usually try to demonstrate that to a partner. Being honest and open and sharing your emotions and sharing your spaces and sharing power.”

"Realizing in life, there’s racism that exists. There are all these different systems of oppression. And then realizing when you come to terms with—I remember when I was younger, way younger, I thought maybe some things were bad, but my personal belief is that we live in a system, multiple layers of systems that benefit a few. There’s elite and the rest of us. I had to come to terms with realizing that what I wanted to do in my life was to fight back against those systems or at least create conditions for people to thrive no matter who they are. This is what I want to do with my life. And committing to that and guiding my life in a way to do that."

"When your days are done, did you do anything? There's this thing in your head and you have to get it out on the paper. So the inertia of...when all is said and done, did you do it? Did you do it? If not, for me, 'Oh God, I failed.' But then there's the everyday inertia. Did I get to the drawing table today? Did I get to the computer and write something today? The inertia of...you have all these other responsibilities to take care of, you have all these other tasks to get done, you have your own issues that you fight. A lot of people wait for motivation to show up in the room. It's never going to. You just have to do the work. And inertia wants to tell you no."

"I still have the journal that I had when I was fifteen. I wrote an entry that was basically, 'I want to die. I can’t imagine being in a wheelchair all my life.' I’m so glad I have that. And my handwriting was even horrible, chicken scratch, that’s how depressed I was. Seeing that is crazy. People have asked me if I can relate to that girl. There’s part of me that’s in there, but then there’s a side of me that sees it as just the circumstance. Even though those were valid feelings, I can see now how life plays out in the sense that there’s a core you that can go through anything and those circumstances will overflow. It’s just like water. You can be on top of the water, under the water, you can be feeling like you’re drowning. Then at the end of the day it’s still you there figuring out that this is a shit storm. Then, wait, there’s land. And you can see the water from a different perspective."

"Being shaken into consciousness whatever that shake is. The AA slang is your bottom is when you stop digging. For some people it takes a stroke. For some people it’s a broken nail. For some it’s real arrests and real problems. Everyone’s shake-up happens. Not everyone, but a lot of people go through this. You hope it happens in soft and gentle ways, but unfortunately that’s not always the case, sometimes it’s too late and there’s real damage done. Going through it isn’t easy. Once you emerge, perspective becomes real. How you live in love, how you live in gratitude. For me it dramatically shifted.

"I went through three years of the choice to be alone. I tell some people that and they’re like, 'No way! Three years??' And I talk to other people and they’re like, 'Yeah, I’ve been single for 16 years. Tell me about it.' Three years was a huge deal for me and it was excruciating at times. But there was—how am I ever going to hear the voice of God if I don’t know what it’s like to be alone? If I’m never alone with Him, I always have noise or something else filling it in. So that was a huge learning time for me. Then I built up enough in myself that I didn’t experience loneliness even though I was alone, and it actually became fitting to add someone to me. I became whole enough that I didn’t need a woman to fill a void."

"I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. Love for me, in terms of a romantic love, is two people coming from two different worlds and coming together and making a new world that is fit for the both of them. It usually comes with a struggle, but obviously, the romanticism and the beauty that comes from the struggle and from the infatuation you have with each other is this thing. It feels like if you were alone in this world the whole time, all of a sudden it’s like this energy has been with you the whole time, and it makes you feel like any moment that you felt alone, you weren’t, and now you know you have this thing.

I’ve been really struggling in writing about love and trying to figure out how to represent it. And I think that’s what it is. You see it in movies and books and everything, and you see two people coming together and they take a part of each other and start to adapt in their own lives until they’ve created a bubble that works for the two of them."

Annie: "It’s funny because I’ve always viewed myself as a contemporary of women like that. I see myself as inspired by Lena Dunham, but I am just like her. We are colleagues. Which is not realistic because she has Emmy awards and lots of money and she can make anything she wants, but I still see her as my contemporary. I want to sit and discuss themes with her."

Betsy: "Our dogs go to the same doggie day care so I also feel like her contemporary."

"You can’t change the world, but you can make aspects of it move in the direction you want to. Through PR you have access to—let’s say if I was a writer for a publication, I’d only be able to write for that publication and my editor would be my boss, but working in PR, I have access to every publication that exists, and can get stories of things that I want in the world out there to shift the whole story. Then I have access to hundreds of millions of people as opposed to the maybe hundreds of thousands that one outlet would have. That’s why you have to be super careful of what you’re putting out there because you don’t want to make something that hurts people."

"There’s something that terrifies most partners about having a partner who they know if they left me, I’ll be totally fine, and perhaps if I left them, they would not be totally fine. That’s an imbalance of power. I also really expect a lot from people. I expect the best from myself, but I also expect the best from other people. Which is unfair because I shouldn’t really hold people to my own personal standards, but I really can’t. I’ve tried to work on it. I was single for four years and in that time I did a lot of work on myself, but that’s one thing I just can’t get past. If I can’t have someone who’s up to my standards then I could just hang out by myself. I don’t need money, I don’t need someone to constantly be with me, I can find sex when I need that, I don’t want to have kids. So I don't really need anything from anybody else. When I have a mate I just need them to pay attention to me. But that’s pretty much it. Pay attention and be thoughtful. You never have to buy anything for me. That’s never necessary."

"I love the internet, I came up on the internet, I came up with internet video. Those are my people, that’s where I tried to make the most change initially. I love editing, I don’t like being on set, I don’t like leaving the house, so doing video mash-ups was really a way for me to use the language of pop culture to talk back to popular culture and make these critiques and little video montages. Remixing Sex and the City, remixing Mad Men. These are shows that I really loved and enjoyed, but I also wanted to be a fan and critic of it at the same time. Taking it apart, putting it back together was not only a great way for me to learn how to edit, but how to convey a critical perspective through video in a way, in a language that people already know and understand which is popular culture.

"I had some dark times with drug and alcohol abuse. There were definitely dark moments where I felt outside of the whole experience. I was left isolated. And that was another thing my wife helped with with—she brought me out of that. Not actively, but through my meeting her it evolved me out of that self-destructive state of mind.

This idea that there’s this source, like a river, and being connected to that, and my biggest fear is being somehow isolated from that or being detached."

"If we all sit back and think about our creative heroes—musically, artistically, painters, sculptors—a lot of them aren’t that happy in their lives and they’re filled with angst and there’s tragedy, and I’m constantly thinking, 'Do I need more tragedy in my life to create the kind of brilliance that I want to leave that legacy?' And then you think, 'Does it matter to van Gogh, now that he’s dead, that he’s a hero to so many people when he was so miserable in his life?' So the big question I have is: Is it better to be creating things that people eventually think are brilliant, but you personally, during your life, are not that happy? Or is it better to be stoked every day and wake up—I know a lot of people who I would describe as smart, but simple…where they’re interesting, they’re good people, but they don’t think about the world as deeply as I do and because of that, I think they’re happier. I have a tremendous amount of envy for them."

"Nothing’s going to get handed to you. You need to show that you have a talent, first of all, obviously, but the work ethic that goes behind it as well. I worked full-time at a bakery after I graduated college and on my off days, I would come in [to the tattoo shop] and clean because [the shop owner], right off the bat, told me, 'I’m not going to offer you an apprenticeship.' So I did it thinking that it would just be a good experience and she would give me a good recommendation down the road. So after a few months of doing that, she offered me an apprenticeship. And I had no idea that was coming. I was thinking, 'She hates me, she’s not going to give me anything.' I had absolutely zero idea. I cried. "

"I’ve just not really been making time for reading. And with such a strong relationship to feminism for a lot of years and not knowing a lot of history of that and definitely having a limited view of what that is, that’s one topic I've been into. Right now I’m reading feminist sci-fi by Octavia Butler which is totally not a genre that I had any interest in, but I realize that dystopian, feminist, sci-fi version is kind of my jam! That feels like the current, 'I want to spend some time with this and catch up on it because I feel like I haven’t given myself or shown up for.'"